Beyond takes Gold and two Platinums at the Hermes Awards
At Beyond, we love awards. But what we love more is creating beautiful experiences that transform the world around us for the better. Imagine our delight when the two came together recently. We were just recognized by the 2019 Hermes Creative Awards for three sites we designed and built: a Gold Award in Website Design for Google’s Safe.Page, a Platinum Award in Health for California Tobacco Control Program’s Never Just a Smoke site, and another Platinum in Social Good for their Flavors Hook Kids site.
We built Google’s Safe.Page to help website creators understand how to recognize a safe URL. It may seem alarmingly simple, but most people don’t know how to read a URL. That carries risks. Bad actors often dupe users with fake URLs to steal important information. Using design grounded in empathy and a diverse cast of illustrated characters, we created a web experience that made URL reading easy to understand. As the next generation of creators set out to leave their mark on the Internet, we’re helping them stay safe online, and in turn, create a safer world for web browsing.
Pivoting into the health space with California Tobacco Control Program, we built neverjustasmoke.org to send social smokers an important message: even periodic tobacco use can have dangerous side effects. Built with a simple, intuitive UI and compelling experience design, the site thoughtfully guides social smokers from a state of denial to a state of acknowledgement, persuading them to quit tobacco products altogether. Within the first three months, 1,320 users pledged to stop and 941 users visited cessation resources. We also saw a 73% increase in session duration, a 15% decrease in bounce rate, as well as a 33% increase in engagement with our social smoking educational content.
Flavors Hook Kids was a powerful response to California Tobacco Control Program’s ask: build a digital presence (alongside their ad campaign) that informed, inspired, and activated concerned parents and others about the tobacco industry’s deceptive marketing targeted at kids. We built an easy-to-digest site that rang an alarm and armed parents with the information they need to understand the dangers their kids face. We also provided clear paths to activism, resulting in over 5K letters of concern being sent to government officials, 1K requests to join a local coalition, and over 1K guide downloads to help parents identify e-cigarette use with their kids.
The Hermes Creative Awards are administered and judged by the Association of Marketing and Communication Professionals (AMCP), a distinguished third-party evaluator of creative work for over 20 years.
